KUIPERS: I’m going to try to stay off biography; I really want to get commentary on the works themselves. I’ve read everything, and I’m on the last twenty pages of Empire of the Senseless.
ACKER: Good. Oh, really? How did you get hold of that?
KUIPERS: Ira [Silverberg, of Grove Press] gave it to me for the Splash review. It’s going to come out in August, which is just the right time…
ACKER: The book is coming out in August?
KUIPERS: No, the book comes out in September or October, but the magazine comes out again in August, so it’s good timing. Is it a reasonable assumption that the books are largely autobiographical?
ACKER: No, it’s not a reasonable assumption. I use autobiographical material, but then I use other material too. It differs from book to book. I’ll say two things: I don’t know what percentage—maybe a fourth of the material is autobiographical. I think that for every fiction writer, to say that something’s not autobiographical is false. I mean, you obviously use your own life when you’re writing and the emotions come up from somewhere and they have to do, obviously, with what’s happening to you as you’re living. But that’s not autobiography. That’s simply what happens in the process of writing.
Direct autobiography? My first work was concerned with fake and actual, fake and real autobiography, and since then I’ve always played around with this kind of autobiographical mode. But the actual material is not very autobiographical.
KUIPERS: Some of the books—especially Blood and Guts in High School and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—seem to be whole in the way that a long poem is a whole: the completion seems to be your completion rather than ours. What is the novel format, to you?
ACKER: I think that what I’d call a novel is different. What I call a novel is so many pages put together. So it’s not a poem, because it’s two hundred pages of text. The novel is obviously narrative—I mean, there are various temporal structures; it’s a temporal structure in words. That’s what a novel is. And there are various temporal structures that are going on. One that you can’t avoid is that the reader starts with the first page and ends with the last page. There’s that structure—Cortázar played around a bit with that in Hopscotch. But, you know, in whatever order you read the pages, you were still going from whatever you started with as page one to whatever you ended up with as page final. The other temporal structure that there is no way of avoiding is that you start writing at one point and you end at another; so there are two temporal structures always counterpointing each other. There’s a third, if you’re using narrative. So on most novels you have three temporal structures. I’d have to talk about each novel—and it’s different for each novel—but I don’t think I ever was using what you’d call traditional narrative, which would be more sort of postindustrial narrative—you know, from Richardson on upwards. Until Empire of the Senseless, which, still, is more epic narrative—which still goes back to earlier narrative structures. If anything, that sort of journeying thing is very early novel structure. The structure of the bourgeois novel—you know, as Barthes talks about in Writing Degree Zero—is something I’ve never used. I’ve never written a Balzacian novel—except, a little bit, Kathy Goes to Haiti, but that was a joke. That I did for a reason: to say, “Hey look; I’ve done it.” Now I never want to do it again.
KUIPERS: All of your work seems to involve a journey of some sort, other than My Death My Life.
ACKER: My Death My Life is probably the most far-out of all the novels I’ve done. I’m glad I did it—I think it failed—I don’t know, maybe fail and succeed aren’t the right words; I took something to a certain point to see what would happen. I’m glad I did it and I saw what that point was, so I never have to do that again. But that was it; I got to that extreme and I see no reason to do it again. I wanted to structure a novel—rather than vertically, that is, based on causality, which is your usual narrative structure—I wanted to structure it horizontally, based on themes, so it was all based on pun structures and things like that. No need to go into detail. I did it, I saw what would happen, and that was that.
KUIPERS: That movement, especially in Empire of the Senseless, is it one of flight or is it movement toward something—for example an actualization of personal power? Is it a completion of sorts or a flight?
ACKER: I think Blood and Guts was flight. Or a scream. I don’t know if it was even flight; everyone, or Janey, was fleeing all the time. Everybody was fleeing all the time, but there was nowhere to go. Pier Pasolini was something else; I don’t think it had anything to do with flight. As I say, it was my—I hate the word postmodernism—it was when I was most influenced by notions of decentralization. So that was something else. Don Quixote was a flight somewhere, but I didn’t know where. It was when I moved—here, autobiography comes in—from the United States to England, and I think that—not directly, but very much, when I reread the book—[that] comes into it. It’s a book about exile. About being lost because you’re exiled. And about looking for something. And I think I found something at the end that, at the beginning, I didn’t know that that’s what I was looking for. At the end, I got very disinterested in avant-gardism, you know, in this lack of narrative. And I started looking toward primitive narratives as a way to go.
KUIPERS: As in?
ACKER: I don’t know what other word to use. I guess anything out of the First World…I mean, away from the First World…I mean, I was looking to African novels…So I was looking to—I don’t know how to put it—non-White structures? It’s not quite that, but you get the point. If all these words don’t smack of racism. Empire of the Senseless is obviously about flight somewhere; Abhor and Thivai are both looking. It’s probably the first book where there is some kind of resolution at the end, or to me there is, definitely.
KUIPERS: Absolutely. They seem to move toward solutions.
ACKER: Yeah. It’d be hard to say, I mean, it’s not an easy solution, what that solution is. But I felt that there were definitely solutions.
KUIPERS: One of those that I’m most interested in is the movement from powerlessness to power.
ACKER: Well, that’s what Empire of the Senseless is about. It’s the first time I think I’ve ever gotten to any sense of power, ’cause most of my books are about powerlessness.
KUIPERS: How do obsessions relate to power or powerlessness?
ACKER: I’ve never really thought about it…
KUIPERS: There’s so much in your work about…
ACKER: Obsession, yeah. Empire of the Senseless, in the way it’s structured, might have something to do with obsession in that it’s about taboos. The first part is about the patriarchal taboo, about the oedipal taboo. So it’s sort of an homage to the world of the fathers, or the world of the patriarchs. It was my description of the world of the patriarchs. So the chapter is very much about the father, both politically and personally, and about Abhor’s relation to her father. And about incest. It’s about the oedipal taboo; it’s also about an obsession, right? For Abhor, her relation to this patriarchal society wasn’t simply one of hatred; that would be very simple, and I think this is where you get one of the double-binds that women are in: her relation is love/hate. Certainly, for women, what’s happened is because women were defined by their sexualities for so many years, they were either wife or whore, and that’s how they earned their living. Their sexuality was defined economically, and yet their sexuality was the area of freedom for them, was their area of survival. There’s an immense double-bind in a lot of ways going on. Which is the patriarchal society. I don’t know if that’s a clear statement about obsession and whatever you asked about—power—but that has to do with it.
KUIPERS: Could, for example, sexual obsession reflect on notions of power?
ACKER: Yeah, well, people…what happened to Abhor in this first part, since it’s mostly about her, is she was put in this position of being obsessed. I mean, is the word obsessed even accurate? Somewhat. I mean, of being in this double-bind, of having this love/hate thing with her father, which was a sort of obsession.
KUIPERS: It definitely ruled her life. Whether that was a positive or negative was…
ACKER: Blockage. It defined her feelings toward the world. The second section of Empire of the Senseless is about what society would look like if it had other taboos than the oedipal one. So, what I tried to do was break taboos. I did my research on various taboos and sort of went through them.
KUIPERS: How so? When you say “research”…
ACKER: Oh, homosexuality, child sex, tattooing. I mean, there are others—I didn’t get into eating, but, you know. And there’s been a furious reaction to the book in England, and I think it’s partly that, that I was breaking taboos.
KUIPERS: Furious reaction?
ACKER: Oh, God. In absolute hatred. Vogue said I should be exiled. The Independent, which is a big newspaper, called me a junkie. It made the front page of most literary sections.
KUIPERS: You’re a success!
ACKER: Well, in a manner of speaking. If I don’t get exiled. It’s kind of calmed back there now.
KUIPERS: Would they do that?
ACKER: I was very worried for a while. Because my residency is not permanent. I think it’s okay now, ’cause it’s kind of turned. But for a while it was very rough.
KUIPERS: [silence]
ACKER: So I can’t think of an instance of breaking these taboos where you find obsession. I mean, I can’t think of any obsession in the second chapter. The characters seem to slip it out in their acts.
KUIPERS: Do the characters fixate upon the taboos?
ACKER: Well, you’ve read the book. I can’t think that they do. Abhor follows…Abhor fixates upon following the sailor. Obviously, the line between fixation and fascination—you know, that looks a bit like fixation or fascination, which desire does. But, if we’re talking about real obsession, no. ’Cause you know, she sees it, she goes. Thivai escapes from jail and gets fucked by Mark and says: “Okay, thank you.” I don’t see any fixation going on, especially in the second chapter. And in the third chapter there isn’t any fixating going on.
KUIPERS: Maybe a way to characterize the relation is that, for example, in a situation of powerlessness, where you can’t act, like being in jail, is perhaps where there is more obsession than there is any actual fascination or desire because you can’t express it.
ACKER: Well, in jail I think there’s fantasy. The obsession is fantastic. You’re in the world of your mind.
KUIPERS: How much does the actualization of what you perceive to be your own personal power—or that of the characters in your books—have to do with one’s identity?
ACKER: You mean do I identify with any of the characters in the book—in this one? Not directly, no. At times, of course; that’s how I write them. They’re sort of like voices I hear, and they’re in my head, and, after a while, they become real people. And then they do things they do, rather than what I’d do. But in the beginning, they’re what I’d do. In the beginning, there’s a question of…the grain of sand in the oyster…what’s bothering me. And obviously, this book was something about: “How are things possible?” “How can you not live nihilistically in what looks like a fairly nihilistic society?” So that was the question mark that I started with, and I wanted both a female and a male voice ’cause I wanted…this was a conscious decision. (’Cause, obviously, you work unconsciously; you don’t just work consciously. I can tell you my conscious decisions. I can’t tell you my unconscious decisions.) Consciously, I wanted a male and a female voice ’cause in all the other books I had only had one voice, and usually a woman’s voice. Or else a man/woman or whatever.
KUIPERS: To me they come off completely androgynous, dominated to a certain extent by the female voice.
ACKER: Yeah, or androgynous.
KUIPERS: That’s interesting that you say these characters do become parts of you. Which ones stay with you the most?
ACKER: Abhor, in this case. See, Thivai came to resemble a friend of mine. And Mark, I must say, was different. Thivai and Abhor were in me, and then became out of me—became other people, but they were very much in me. Mark is truly out of me; he’s based upon a friend of mine, almost literally, named Mark. And I did ask Mark’s permission to do this.
KUIPERS: I was going to ask if that ever happened. They seem to be characters in a dreamscape.
ACKER: Yeah, they’re usually characters in a dreamscape.
KUIPERS: That you create them in order to express an inner necessity.
ACKER: I think that’s true in all the books before this. I think that Abhor and Thivai were more characters than that—for me. It was the first time I ever had a sense of molding a character. I never had before. I mean, Janey Smith wasn’t a character: she was a fiction I made to join together the chapters.
KUIPERS: How much do you think you spend time developing them, as opposed to using them as a voice?
ACKER: I think until Empire they were just a voice. I wasn’t involved in creating character. It wasn’t so much a voice that I was involved in finding; it was really just theoretical journey. I was involved in going through various, whatever, theoretical…
KUIPERS: Sort of a journey for yourself, as a writer, as a passage through characters, rather than taking the characters and moving them somewhere.
ACKER: Specifically, what I do—say, in Great Expectations—is I remember that in that third chapter I had a problem about rape—no, about S&M—so I took texts that were about S&M and put them next to each other. I think I took Sartre’s business about the emotions and the Story of O and put them next to each other, to try to find out what I thought of this situation. So that’s what I meant by a theoretical journey. Pasolini was certainly structured that way.
KUIPERS: Chunks of theme material.
ACKER: Yeah. It was all about theme, and that was the narrative. Don Quixote, again, absolutely, yes. Empire of the Senseless, no. I mean, it’s partly structured on this business of taboo, but it’s also that the characters are real for me. I’ve never thought about a character before that. I mean, the dogs weren’t…the dogs came alive for me in Don Quixote, but I can’t say that they did in the same way as Thivai and Abhor did.
KUIPERS: As readers, as far as identifying with the character—which is something we do with almost every other type of novel—what we get from your style is a series of statements, of decisions, of judgments. “I’m going to do this. I’m not going to do this.” Lots of times in a very oppositional way. It’s like it’s a kind of catalogue of an analytical mind.
ACKER: Don Quixote—the first part of Don Quixote—is very close to the original Quixote. So it was a bit how Cervantes was working, you know, using his knight as a way of questioning the relation of fiction and reality.
KUIPERS: I guess the essence of my question is: How much can we identify with them?
ACKER: I don’t think I’m interested in you, the reader, identifying with the character. Except insofar as you identify with the search—you know, you say: “This is interesting. I have the same problem; let’s see where we get to…”
KUIPERS: What is it, then, that we are identifying with?
ACKER: You have to identify to read? You don’t identify when you read an historical text. You don’t identify when you read philosophy. I mean the process of identification seems to have to do with…
KUIPERS: I’m assuming a different kind of involvement.
ACKER: Well, if you read a novel full of horrible characters…I mean, I’m not sure that one always identifies, other than to say: “Oh, I have those horrible things in me.” But that would seem to mean that every time you read you would have to be able to…
KUIPERS: Find the one closest to yourself? No, I don’t think that’s essential, either.
Why do you think this technique of having characters which you just didn’t develop as real people—why is that technique more effective to you than just writing a straight, like you say, Balzacian novel?
ACKER: You’re making the problem of character central, which it never was to me. What the Balzacian novel is is the reality—novelist sits down and says: “There’s a certain ordered reality—or else maybe it’s not so ordered—but I’m going to either order that reality or I’m going to express that ordered reality.” And it’s very much, as Barthes says, the feeling of someone who’s an owner, who knows…that people have names, they’re identifiable through time. And they act in certain understandable ways and causality is still fairly understandable and the Aristotelian unities hold. You know—it’s about the fact that the human knows the world and the world is a knowable situation, that time is fairly ordered, and that things work—you know, in a sort of Newtonian manner. I don’t think we live in such a world anymore. Certainly, any artist since Cubism hasn’t been working in that kind of world. I wanted the same freedom in a novel. You know, I come out of the poets. I wanted to be able to examine the relations of language to what isn’t language—if you want, call it reality. I wanted to be able to examine how different texts…I write by using other texts, and I really write in a way that some of the early Cubists worked: I put texts next to other texts…
KUIPERS: Your own, or someone else’s?
ACKER: What? Almost all of my work is plagiarized. Very little is written by myself. It’s always other texts. Like I say, I have this theme or this problem, and what I do is take all these other texts and structure them next to each other—for various reasons. Sometimes it would be to deconstruct. Sometimes it would be to construct, sometimes to compare, sometimes to find out, sometimes I say: “Oh, well, what’s this thing S&M?”—then I take a whole bunch of S&M texts in. The text was reality, for me. It’s certainly seeing language as primary reality. I think in the works—Blood and Guts was slightly different, but from Great Expectations through Don Quixote—the main work was that kind of structuralism. It was putting these texts next to each other, like I say, for various reasons. I’d have to go over the book to say exactly how each thing was structured. And I simply wanted that: I wanted that textuality; I wanted that sensuality—as a novel. Much as a painter could have that. I didn’t see why I couldn’t have that freedom when all of my friends who were painting had that same freedom. If Dave and Sally could do it, why the hell can’t I do it? So, as I say, I had no interest in character. I think that in Great Expectations there is a character that develops finally through the novel, but it is the character of my mother or something. It’s hard for me to say why, but there’s no character in the Balzacian sense.
Now, in Don Quixote I didn’t want to do that anymore, and Empire of the Senseless is something else, but that’s what I wanted to do with those novels, that’s all.
KUIPERS: Even Ira [Silverberg] was saying that Empire is more accessible.
ACKER: Oh, yeah, because it’s more traditional.
KUIPERS: I want to go back to these questions of power, because it’s something I work on myself. Again, in Empire of the Senseless we find that personal identity is linked to political power—in certain ways, all of the oppressed or people who are not of the multinationals are the Algerians in Paris or are the IRA in Ireland or are the blacks or poor in America. We can be the Algerians? That can be a symbolic people?
ACKER: I guess I sort of see what’s happening, although this isn’t why I picked the Algerians. It’s that I see that this distinction that’s been made, historically, between the First World and the Third World, has now become a distinction not so much between the Anglo-Saxon/United States/English world, for instance, and the black South Africa, but a distinction which can occur within the urban center. So, within an urban center, you have your First World and your Third World. And most of us belong to the Third World; that’s quite true in our daily lives.
The reason that I picked the Algerians is partly because sometimes I find that the most direct way of talking about things is to talk about them indirectly, and I wanted to talk about the Puerto Ricans in New York. I felt more freedom to pick Paris. Also, I happen to have a lot of Algerian friends in Paris. This is a true situation, which I sort of embroidered on. And I always work fairly literally—I don’t make up things…
KUIPERS: Are these distinct realities: personal liberation and political liberation?
ACKER:…Oh, I was going to say, anyway, that the model was the early Haitian revolution. I don’t think that the personal is separate from the political, in any way whatsoever.
KUIPERS: It certainly feels that way in the novels. A piece about someone’s escape from their father or some cycle of abuse is placed right next to the IRA running to blow someone up. It doesn’t feel separate at all.
ACKER: When you say: “Are they autobiographical?”—if there is autobiographical material in the novel, it’s seen in large scope.
KUIPERS: This condition of powerlessness. Can you talk about the distinctions you made in My Death My Life between Something and Nothing.
ACKER: I don’t remember. Oh, that’s Pasolini.
KUIPERS: How Ireland had Nothing and the English had Something. There was a distinction there between a state of emptiness—not emptiness, but Nothing—and Something.
ACKER: That’s certainly what the English think the Irish are. I don’t remember the exact thing, I must say. I wrote it a long time ago. I hadn’t lived in England when I wrote it, so I don’t think I meant this when I wrote it, but the English make themselves. They have very clear self-identities. They’ve got a myth of the Empire, though the Empire’s been long since dead, and they see themselves—if I can describe it—as leaders, really. Very good leaders: that they’re not arrogant, they’re not loud, they’re quiet, they’re well-behaved, they’re highly cultured…
KUIPERS: Confident of their power.
ACKER:…Very confident of their power. And their power is the power of the word; it’s a verbal power. They’ve got the language of Milton and of Shakespeare. An Englishman would never be something…a distinction that my mother used to make between the nouveau riche and the old rich: the old rich didn’t need to show their money and the nouveau riche were cheap because they had to parade their money. Well, the English don’t need to parade their culture and their power. There’s a real arrogance. Whereas the Irish are uncouth, boring, loud, do everything a bit too much…
KUIPERS: Peasants.
ACKER: Yes. And so are the Americans, to the English. Frankly, all of the colonies are the same to the bloody English.
KUIPERS: There’s a real sense of identification, on your part, with the side of Nothing, rather than the side of Something.
ACKER: Yeah.
KUIPERS: Does that represent a truer state of being or a state of Nature? Not having the underdog.
ACKER: I’d rather not be a snob than be a snob. I’d rather be Irish than English, any day. Oh, the snob system there! There’s nothing—well, I can think of a lot of things I wouldn’t like to be—but being an upper-middle-class English prat is one of the more unfortunate things to be, I think. I’ve really had it! Not the most pleasant people in the world. I mean, the lower class is great, but this culture is run by the class system…
KUIPERS: What about the United States?
ACKER: No. Racism. We have a class system, but not the same. I mean, if we were sitting here in England, we would immediately be in a certain class, everybody would know what class we were; if we were in the wrong class, the waiters would hardly serve us. You’d be well-aware that you were not in the right place. Everywhere you go, you’re told what class you are, because of the accent; everybody knows everybody’s accents. It’s class, right?
KUIPERS: So those people who belong to minorities who enter into the middle class in America—blacks who are successful in business, and so forth—do you consider them exceptions, since our system is supposedly based on race? I still see it largely as class; there are blacks who discriminate and hold down other blacks.
ACKER: Yeah. But England is different. See, ’cause a person here—not that they can come up that much—but, in a way, a person can. There is a certain amount of freedom. That person of whatever race…race will hold a person down here, but…say, in the art world, I think most of the people are middle class, but if your parents are lower class and you’ve actually made it into the art world, you’re not going to be held down ’cause your parents were from the lower class. You absolutely would be in England. In fact, you don’t even try. And that’s the whole thing: everyone’s accepted, interiorized the class system. And they don’t even try to get better.
KUIPERS: It’s a caste system, then.
ACKER: It’s caste, yes.
KUIPERS: I’ve never been there long enough to pick that up.
ACKER: That’s why India and England went along so well together.
KUIPERS: It was understood.
ACKER: And it’s really repressive. It’s just…[sigh].
KUIPERS: That’s why you want to come back here? One of the reasons?
ACKER: Oh, it’s Thatcher. I just miss my country.
KUIPERS: Do you equate the position of women, when you talk about prostitutes, whores, with that sense of powerlessness? Is there a similar powerlessness in, say, the Algerians in Paris or the Puerto Ricans in New York as there is with your perception of the position of women, as far as power is concerned?
ACKER: I would say that all those groups are powerless, but it would be a bit simplistic to say that women are the same as Algerians in Paris or anything like that. The situations are different. Powerlessness applies to both groups in certain ways.
KUIPERS: We talked earlier about how part of your work is to find solutions to these situations; the ones I’ve identified in my notes are: becoming as corrupt as the system in order to get on top and stomp on people…
ACKER: Does that seem like a solution?
KUIPERS: No, but it was offered there.
ACKER: Yes.
KUIPERS: “The only way to beat the corruption is to become as corrupt,” is how I think it went. Another one was to sow anarchy wherever you can, and one of the ways that comes right out of the structure of the book is in the language.
One of the comments that you made—I think it was in My Death My Life—mentioned that writers are down there chopping away at the institutions and institutionalized power structures. In what way? What are your tools?
ACKER: That was a very idealistic statement. I think that when I wrote that I was thinking of the Dadaists, or certain kinds of writers. Like I say, it’s a very idealistic statement. I think that to the extent that words are part of a control system—William Burroughs has gone into this fairly well; no need to go over that terrain. Or other people, Karl Kraus and the people who came after him. And to the extent that language is used, that language is changed and used in order to exert political power and control in certain ways. You can attack those control systems through language. That doesn’t mean that you can topple a government; that would be incredibly idealistic.
KUIPERS: Do you see a real separation there between writing about such acts—like you say, toppling a government—and actually doing it?
ACKER: I think that writing about toppling a government never got anyone very far. I mean, that’s sort of social realist literature—obviously, a bit of muckraking helped somewhere along the line—I don’t really know what books like The Jungle actually did in those days. I’d be curious to find out. But my feeling is that muckraking never did too much and that the real revolutionary books have been things like Burroughs, where they went to examine the center of the systems, see how the systems work, and say: “Well, we could work this language in other ways.”
KUIPERS: How effective do you think that’s been?
ACKER: I think that it’s not a question of how effective it’s been; it’s a question—I don’t know how clear this is in the United States, but it’s certainly clear in England—that the only chance now is through the imagination. I can talk more clearly about England, ’cause I think that it’s just a much clearer situation over there; I think Thatcher and Company are trying to repress everything. It’s incredible. She said a few days ago that she wants to repress any representation of violence on television, which means she wants to repress the news, right? You can’t show the IRA being blown up anymore. And more and more the effect of things like Clause 28 [Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988]…
KUIPERS: Which is?
ACKER: Most of the arts are government-funded in England, and Clause 28 says that there can be no government funding anything that shows anything homosexual in a good light. Which means, basically, that you can’t have a Michelangelo in the museums. No one’s figured out yet how this is going to be enforced, but it’s quite a brilliant law. One of its effects, of course, is to stop sexuality. Real gay-bashing is going on there. And thank God there’s been a lot of fighting about this clause. In every way possible, she’s trying to normalize life. She’s trying to attack every aspect of life so that you have less possibilities. You have less and less sexual possibilities; you have less and less economic possibilities. You know, the country’s being economically polarized very fast. Of course, in a Yuppie society, which is what she wants—which is a huge change for the English, ’cause it used to be a welfare state—what’s happening is that you’re losing—I know how corrupt and terrible the art market is right now, and I’m not talking about that—what would be good about art, you’re losing. You’re losing possibility. What art is to me is partly the opening of possibilities. Obviously, if I imagine five fabulous ways in which two people can get along together, that doesn’t mean that it’s really going to happen; but it means that there’s a model, therefore it’s happening. I remember when I was a kid and I was told that sexuality was absolutely wrong, I read Madame Bovary and it made a huge, huge change for me to have this text that said: “Hey, it’s not so bad.” If we lose that…to me, that’s the real radical thing art can do, and that’s what’s really necessary right now, ’cause the Marxist alternative just isn’t a reality right now. It just doesn’t make sense in our society.
KUIPERS: Does it make more sense in England?
ACKER: No. England’s in a real mess because the Left is Kinnock, and Kinnock they still call, poor soul, their little Labor business, and everybody knows that it’s for shit ’cause industry’s dead. It’s a technological society that has to change…
KUIPERS: Management is king…
ACKER: Yeah. The Thatcherites are the only people making sense economically, but they’re disgusting; they’re doing horrible things otherwise. Kinnock’s in a real hole, but Kinnock owns the things otherwise…Kinnock’s in a real hole, but Kinnock owns the Labor Party right now ’cause everybody’s making fun of Tony Badden [sic]. Another mess.
KUIPERS: Revolution in the imagination seems to necessitate a total separation between the world that you and I would live in—desperately wanting some sort of solution to the horror it is to try and live here—and the imagination. Is that some place in which we can live, with a separation like that?
ACKER: I think that we just have to fight. As is said, you can talk about what’s been more successful, tactically, but I think that when you’re up against the wall all you can do is fight. I don’t think that there’s a choice. One doesn’t want to separate the imagination from your reality. But, if it is separate, to deny that separation is stupid. To say: “I love my factory work and I love punching a time clock and I love having to sell paintings that…whatever…
KUIPERS: The separation seems to be running through all of the elements of culture: language is separate from its meaning; the signifier from the signified…
ACKER: That’s one of the problems…
KUIPERS: And labor separated from whatever it is above it or below it…
ACKER: Look at how Reagan uses language; it’s about total separation.
KUIPERS: Doublespeak.
ACKER: Oh, God, yeah.
KUIPERS: You have to have a decoder attached to your televisions.
ACKER: Yeah, it’s brilliant. I mean, what?
KUIPERS: To solutions, again. You do talk about demolition, about destruction of the structures that are there. How does a terrorist function in there? In Blood and Guts, you began equating terrorism with an action towards health.
ACKER: Obviously, I’ve changed about it. I used to be a total romantic about terrorism. Blood and Guts was just like: “Let’s just blow the whole thing up.” A scream, right? I think that I saw the terrorists as the screamers. There’s a very good sentence that I just used in a short story I’ve done, by a guy named Sanguinetti—what’s the pamphlet called—“On the Italian State”?—he writes about the Moro killing—Eduardo Sanguinetti [sic; Gianfranco Sanguinetti, On Terrorism and the State]—and the whole piece starts with the sentence: “Terrorism is the last enigma of the modern state.” And he goes on to explain what he means by that. His case about the Moro killing—and I think it’s a pretty good one—is that it was basically a right-wing presentation. Which I’ve heard from a few journalists. He talks about two kinds of terrorism: offensive terrorism and defensive terrorism. He said that offensive terrorism never wins. Offensive terrorism is like the IRA; now the IRA does not see what it’s doing as terrorism—they see what they’re doing as war against England. We can hate war or whatever we feel about war, but, come on, a lot of people go to war. England went to war with the Falklands and with a lot less reason than the IRA with England. It’s the English who call it terroristic. So I think that we’re finding…[side two tape]
The other thing is defensive terrorism, and that’s when the government, which is usually a right-wing government, makes up a situation where it looks like the most radical part of the left wing has done a very stupid killing or a very stupid act. And they do this in order to splinter the Left.
KUIPERS: Same sort of tactic as disinformation.
ACKER: Yeah. Obviously, we’ve seen that, too.
KUIPERS: What’s the difference between the terrorists peopling the earlier novels and the pirates in Empire of the Senseless? Where did that title come from?
ACKER: Empire of the Senseless? Mainly because the ICA—this art institute in London—was doing a show of sci-fi, slash-and-gash films, like Reanimator and things like that, and they called the whole thing Empire of the Senseless. I’ve always loved the movie Empire of the Senseless. I went, “Ooh, that sounds so great.” I appropriated it.
The pirates. You mean Blackbeard and all that? That whole section taken from Huck Finn. The reason I used Huck Finn is ’cause that seems to be the text about American freedom. And that’s kind of what the book is about, is how when you live in this kind of creepy society you can have any freedom. Maybe that’s about racism, but I was more interested in sexism and the relations between the sexes. There’s a section about pirates in Huck Finn, so that’s how the pirates got in there. And to be a pirate—that’s kind of like the dumb myth of freedom; go make our own laws and control our own ship.
KUIPERS: It doesn’t come off as being dumb. There’s a certain amount of belief in it.
ACKER: Oh, yeah! By dumb, I just mean that it’s idealistic. It’s when the idealism meets the actuality that you have your complexities; obviously, neither I, you, nor Abhor and Thivai are going to go off and be pirates. I’ve heard that there are pirates now on the China Sea, but I can’t imagine us actually…I don’t really want to go to the China Sea and be a pirate!
KUIPERS: Or on the Caribbean…
ACKER: Yeah.
KUIPERS: Is it more a freedom move to be a pirate than a terrorist?
ACKER: You’re asking about degrees of romanticism…who are the terrorists—the IRA? Is that a move of freedom? Whether they’re wrong or they’re right, they’re certainly looking for self-control, which is a better word than freedom, and they’re certainly fighting for political self-control. The pirates are obviously a reaction to political repression, again, but it’s a different sort of move, isn’t is? It’s a much more individualistic move. That your lone terrorist would just come along—I’ve heard about the days of kneecapping in Italy, when kids would go out and kneecap, but that’s not what either of us are talking about.
There’s a lot of anarchic violence going on in England right now, a lot of cop-bashing, especially outside the urban areas. And they’re all saying: “Oh, it’s just the hooligans; they drink too much.” It’s not exactly the situation. I don’t think that’s terrorism, and I don’t think that’s acts of piracy. But there’s something there that’s a reaction to the oppression.
KUIPERS: It’s more like gang violence.
ACKER: Yeah; it’s very anarchic. It’s what you have in England ’cause they’ve never had a revolution there. Maybe what you’re asking me is whether it’s better to work in a political group like the IRA.
KUIPERS: Is it more effective?
ACKER: I don’t know. Historically, I don’t know.
KUIPERS: Should we be seeking personal freedom or working toward…
ACKER: Don’t they work together? Weren’t the nihilists in Russia the precursors to the revolution? I don’t see that it’s dualistic.
KUIPERS: Change of direction. There’s a place in the book where you find yourself in what’s essentially a feminist utopia, and denying it.
ACKER: Oh, that’s in the brothel.
KUIPERS: Yes; there’s only women, there’s no me…
ACKER: That’s Thivai talking, right? It matters; my memory is that Thivai’s in the brothel and there’s all women.
Would I want to live in a separatist society? No. There’s stuff in Don Quixote which is an argument against separatism, very directly. It could have come out unconsciously; I’m very much not a separatist. I mean personally, emotionally, and politically. If other women are, it’s fine; everyone has their own tastes, their own decision. For me, the feminist struggle—which is not for every woman—is not about denying men. It’s about self-control in a world that’s both men and women.
KUIPERS: You talked about pirates as a “mirror of our sexuality.”
ACKER: That’s pretty cool. I kind of like that. Sexuality. I have a friend staying with me and we had a discussion about sexuality, and I said: “You either accept it or repress it, but don’t go getting guilty and moralizing it!” Yeah, it is ‘ol piracy. Good bourgeois behavior and sexuality don’t quite go hand-in-hand.
KUIPERS: Temporal structure in narrative. What we get in your books is little chunks of time and space, and in the next chunk there’s a new time and space. Unlike some literature and music, which attempt complete breaks with the past, or an historical location, there seems to be a sense of inclusion. All times on top of each other.
ACKER: My effects are usually more about thematics. Once revolution happens in Paris [Empire of the Senseless], that’s not true, ’cause it all happens in Paris from then on. So this is prior to Paris. My model for that whole section prior to Paris was a book called Neuromancer by William Gibson. It’s part of a whole movement called cyberpunk, and it’s very much what will happen in cyberpunk. I was very enamored; sometimes I copy books ’cause I want to do what they’re doing, and I really wanted to find out how to do it and I want to understand it. Gibson, in Neuromancer, is doing something I really want to understand. Absolutely brilliant. In some ways, he’s taking some of the things Burroughs had done and taking it further. Burroughs has lost it a bit by now, and Gibson hasn’t. Neuromancer is a great book.
KUIPERS: What time period are we talking about?
ACKER: Neuromancer just came out a few years ago. It changed the face of science fiction and started this thing called cyberpunk.
KUIPERS: Not a sci-fi reader; just read my first one at Christmastime.
ACKER: No, it’s a closed world. He invents language in it; what it is is that Burroughs is a lot about minimizing and narrowing and cutting out. What fascinates me about Gibson is that he took some of that, but he was about enlarging. Like you say, it was about totalizing. He goes: “Now we’re in Japan. Now we’re in here. Now we’re here. Now we’re here.” It seemed to be more positive than negative, and I want that positive.
KUIPERS: An ever-widening structure; inclusiveness…
ACKER: Yeah, yeah. So I use some of these structures in there, from Neuromancer, to structure the first part.
KUIPERS: A few quick biographical things. How accurately do your books reflect your travels? Are you widely traveled?
ACKER: Oh, yeah. Well, naw; I’m only widely traveled in Europe and a bit in Mexico and I’ve been to Haiti, but in the Third World I’m not widely traveled at all. But America, Canada, and Europe, yes. Some people are much more widely traveled than I am. But for the average person, yes, I am.
KUIPERS: Education?
ACKER: I went to Brandeis University for two years, then I transferred to the University of San Diego, finished my B.A., did two years toward a Ph.D. Came back, did a year in the joint course in Classics and Philosophy at CCNY and NYU, and then just got out of the whole system. So I was somewhere toward a Ph.D.
KUIPERS: What are you working on now?
ACKER: I’m working on a life of Rimbaud. I’m also broke, so I’m going to do this bodybuilding book, but let’s not talk about that. I’m just broke. That ought to be enough for about two years.
KUIPERS: Are you doing short stories and stuff?
ACKER: Yeah. I do about an article a month.
KUIPERS: Freelancing?
ACKER: Freelancing, yeah. I do readings all the time. I do TV spots now and then…this is in England; I would never be on TV here. I make a living that’s all. Basically, I do my books and I do all this other crap in order to make a living. Many book reviews. I don’t like doing articles unless I have the subject. When they do these opinion things, I can’t stand it. Dumb.
If it’s a good book, it gives you an excuse to talk about something else. For example, I had to review this really great book called Loft Living, for City Limits by a woman named Sharon Zukin—it was a great excuse to talk about the industrialization in London.